Katie Price "drinks too much and sleeps with too many people and talks
about it too much for common decency", according to feminist writer Fay
Weldon.

Katie Price pictured recently on I'm A Celebrity... Get Me Out Of Here!Photo: ITV

8:00AM GMT 01 Dec 2009

However, the author of The Lives and Loves of a She-Devil said Price, the glamour model otherwise known as Jordan, could be considered an "empowering" role model because she has made a lot of money.

"It depends what you think the function of women is," Weldon said, in a talk at the Richmond Book Now Festival in south-west London.

"If it's to look good, then she's fine. If it's to make a lot of money, then she's fine. So I suppose she must be empowering for women because one wants them to be prosperous and they like to look good.

"She drinks too much and sleeps with two many people and talks about it too much for common decency, but who of us is perfect?"

Price, who has 'written' several novels and children's books, is a hot topic amongst Britain's literary heavyweights.

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At another book festival last month, Martin Amis dismissed the model as "two bags of silicone" but said he was so intrigued by her celebrity that his latest novella, State of England, features a character bearing some of her traits.

Lynda La Plante, the crime writer, also criticised Price, saying she was "a terrible thing for young girls".

Weldon, 78, also claimed that feminism has turned women into "wage-slaves".

While conceding that women are generally happier with their lot in the post-feminist era, Weldon said that sexual equality has its drawbacks.

"The downside of feminism is that women are now expected to go out to work, which some women would rather do than looking after the children anyway," said the author.

"Once it was only the men who were wage-slaves, and now it's the men and the women too. You know, I'd really rather blame capitalism... You do feel some qualms for these women who actually have to shove their children's arms into clothes at five o'clock in the morning and get them off to nursery."

Yet feminism remains the "least worst" option and has left the majority of women better off, she insisted.

Speaking at a book festival in Richmond, south-west London, Weldon said: "If you're an intelligent, competent and healthy person it's the most wonderful thing. If you have no aspirations and don't want to do anything except exist, then perhaps the pre-feminist world was better.

"There's never a perfect solution. There's just the least worst. And least worst is feminist society, which is more or less what we're getting now. And people on the whole are happier than they were before... although everybody's much more tired."

The author admitted that she was "never a good feminist". Earlier this year, she caused an outcry by saying that a woman should pick up her husband's socks.